Panel Title
Putting him on a pedestal: (Re)collection and the use of images in Plato’s Phaedrus
Location
Salle Jean Ladrière, Collège Mercier, Place Cardinal Mercier 14, 1348 Louvain-la-Neuve
Start Date
2-14-2014 3:15 PM
End Date
2-14-2014 4:00 PM
Abstract
What is the right way to treat an image? In the Phaedrus Plato plays with the problematic status of images, employing some of his most vivid and memorable images to illustrate how images may be used philosophically in the processes of συναγωγή and ἀνάμνησις. The beautiful beloved serves as an image of the divine reality, and the lover sets up, adorns, and worships this icon as if it were the god itself, for it both reminds him of his prenatal glimpse of the hyperouranian realm and leads his soul back toward that divine reality. Plato describes the lover’s treatment of the beloved as an image of the divine in terms similar to those of the true rhetorician’s construction of a speech that leads the soul of the hearer toward truth. The lover actively tends to this divine image, fashioning it in the likeness of the god he recollects following in the path toward the hyperouranian realm, while Socrates claims that, when he finds someone who can employ philosophical collection and division, he will follow in that man’s tracks as if he were a god. Both the worship paid to the beloved icon and good speeches employ images and mnemonic associations to lead the follower, step by step, toward the truth. While Phaedrus fixes his desire upon the images, both the beloved boy and the speeches, Socrates uses these images as signs on his philosophic path, reminders of whence he has come and whither he is going.
Putting him on a pedestal: (Re)collection and the use of images in Plato’s Phaedrus
Salle Jean Ladrière, Collège Mercier, Place Cardinal Mercier 14, 1348 Louvain-la-Neuve
What is the right way to treat an image? In the Phaedrus Plato plays with the problematic status of images, employing some of his most vivid and memorable images to illustrate how images may be used philosophically in the processes of συναγωγή and ἀνάμνησις. The beautiful beloved serves as an image of the divine reality, and the lover sets up, adorns, and worships this icon as if it were the god itself, for it both reminds him of his prenatal glimpse of the hyperouranian realm and leads his soul back toward that divine reality. Plato describes the lover’s treatment of the beloved as an image of the divine in terms similar to those of the true rhetorician’s construction of a speech that leads the soul of the hearer toward truth. The lover actively tends to this divine image, fashioning it in the likeness of the god he recollects following in the path toward the hyperouranian realm, while Socrates claims that, when he finds someone who can employ philosophical collection and division, he will follow in that man’s tracks as if he were a god. Both the worship paid to the beloved icon and good speeches employ images and mnemonic associations to lead the follower, step by step, toward the truth. While Phaedrus fixes his desire upon the images, both the beloved boy and the speeches, Socrates uses these images as signs on his philosophic path, reminders of whence he has come and whither he is going.